Yes, it's a terrible pun to write the topic like I did, but I just could not resist.

So here's the deal. You always only get the chance to ask me which bugs will be fixed or which features will be implemented. Now you have the chance to ask me everything else.Ask about DXX-Rebirth or ask about me (as long as it gets not too personal). Ask whatever you always wanted to know or what bugs you. I on my side will try to answer as long and boring as possible.

Have fun!

The greatest pleasure in life is to do what people say you cannot do.Uhm... Honey, there's a head in the toilet!

Quote:I've often wondered how Zico gets his inspiration to work on Rebirth. Is there a tiny voice in his head that tells him what to do?

My basic inspiration is my personal relation ship with the game. I started playing in 95 and I played it for years. Winter 2003 I moved to Linux which completly destroyed my possibilities to play the game. DOSBox wasn't good enough at this time to actually play Descent or even Descent II - nor was my Hardware. I ended up playing D1X and D2X but I hated the flaws they had. I could report bugs to D2X, but D1X was stalled/dead already. I first created some installers for these games and lived with it - until I managed to compile D2X. After that I tried to find the source of some annoying things... When I had my first success, I digged in deeper.

What you see today - all this project evolved step by step - originated from this point. I actually learned a bit C and dealt with other things. My main inspiration still is just to get what I lost when my DOS games ceased to function. Of course I still introduce new stuff but the basic idea is: It MUST BE Descent!

Everything I do orbits around this philosophy. This and a good portion of pragmatism. I see no sense to build something new on this old engine. Descent is what I want and it is what I do. If that means I have to live with some limitations - fine. But the IT-technology moves on, and every program needs to move with it - or it dies. I do not want that to happen. So I try to keep up. UDP as we all know is important as IPX is more and more obsolete these days. 3D-accelleration also is very important and the most efficient way to render 3-dimensional structures. All these are details - looking small but important, still.

You should not see what I did - if you just enjoy it, I did a good job. And that is my motivation: Play it, enjoy it. Everyone who likes the game should be able to play it. Sure there are frustrating and demotivating factors here and there, but we came so far and one day - I promise - the game will be rock solid and smooth like a 16 year old girls skin. After that I can relax a bit and *only* focusing on keeping up with new technologies. But PARALLAX left me much work to do until I reach that point. But hey, this is also what keeps me on it: It's THERE so I just have to do it.

The greatest pleasure in life is to do what people say you cannot do.Uhm... Honey, there's a head in the toilet!

The short answer would be: As few as possible, as many as necessary. But MULTIPLAYER is one VERY big thing.

The long one: The DESCENT Engine definetely is a project you can work on for years without archieving ANYTHING visible. And there, we also build up the newest stuff. Stuff you will hardly notice.The next *few* versions will (in terms of what you can *see*) not contain too much new stuff, but many things will change in the background. I think what you might see may be an improved multiplayer, maybe a tracker an possibly some improvements on the rendered reticle.And... well, if Sniper agrees you might also get another surprise or two.

Actually let's not dumb down the Multiplayer - which is what I am working on right now. In my opnion, we always had too many limitations in what we could do to IMPROVE (not extend) the Multiplayer because we needed to keep backwards compability so IPX guys can play with whatever they want.Don't get me wrong: I won't throw out IPX too soon. It will DIE - that's a fact, but for some reason I respect those who still need it. But this compability layer is just the main bottleneck. So now I am introducing an abstraction between both protocols. So get ready for the next EXE files which will be a bit larger. This new, expandable layer needs many rewritten code, much which must be done from scratch, and a lot of writing so we basically get TWO working protocols. For one thing this will now increase DOS-backwards compability to max if you are on IPX and gives me the chance to do the real stuff in UDP.UDP will be re-modeled into a Client/Server system, where only the game host needs to open his ports. It will demand a faster connection (to HOST the game, not to join it) and your Pings will get a bit more important, too .... not that it would matter with this pretty inaccurate engine.Okay, I am drifting in what I already wrote in my Development Thread, but you need to know: This IS what I now do for MONTHS already and it will be what the next version will show the most changes (hopefully good ones).... can I mention again that I NEVER play Multiplayer?

In the long run I want to do some tuning and optimisations on the engine. But I also have some ideas that are far in the future so I could sa ysomething about them now but mainly only to disappoint you if it not happens too soon.

Still, the main thing is: DESCENT was and IS an awesome game. So never change a winning team. What you can see visually in the game and feel from the gameplay, will not change too much under my command. If you just look to the Singleplayer of the game it already is (apart from the finetuning and bug-fixing) what I basically want to have. The rest will be done in the background. You won't see the most of it, but with every new version you get something that hopefully runs a bit more solid than the last one and is based on a platform which is WAY more future-ready thn the game EVER was.

The greatest pleasure in life is to do what people say you cannot do.Uhm... Honey, there's a head in the toilet!

Quote:The thing with IPX is that Kali still needs it to play, but I guess you can get around that by coordinating a UDP game.

My question: What was the deal with the "Fusion bug" and to what extent did it exist in D2? What did you do to address this if you did at all.[me=Duper]steps down from the mic.[/me]

Well, I am aware of the "Fusion keeps loading"-bug. As far as I know that topic was already adressed in the D1X-development (so not thanks would go to me here). And as far as nothing has been messed up, it should be fixed in both Rebirth programs as well. I must admit I never saw this in my times and I haven't actually tried it out. So if it's still there - just let me know. This Bug sometimes was even used as a Gameplay element. I was a bit concerned about that, cause I said I would not change the Gameplay. However in this case I think this is definetly not what PARALLAX had in mind.

The other "Fusion-bugs" I am aware of mostly are related to FPS: Ship shaking, etc. But I think 0.55 should have covered that, too.

The greatest pleasure in life is to do what people say you cannot do.Uhm... Honey, there's a head in the toilet!